Excerpt from Timekeepers by Simon Garfield, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Towards the end of 1883, the Indianapolis Centennial noted that in the ultimate quarrel between man and nature, man had finally and irrevocably pulled ahead: 'The sun is no longer to boss the job...The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time.' At the heart of the newspaper's distaste for this new system lay the diminishing role of the church and its bells calling congregants to prayer (and in effect the whole God-given scheme of things). 'The planets must, in the future, make their circuits by such timetables as railroad magnates arrange…People will have to marry by railroad time.' A reporter in Cincinnati observed that 'the longer a man is a commuter the more he grows to be a living timetable.'

The word 'commuter' was brand new (one who 'commuted' or shortened their journey). But the notion of the railway timetable, novel at the launch of the Liverpool and Manchester line in 1830, was by now ingrained in the soul. The first international railway timetable conference took place in Cologne in February 1872. Representatives from Austria, France, Belgium and Switzerland joined delegates from a newly unified Germany. The debate was both a simple and a complicated one: how to coordinate trains running across international borders to facilitate smooth travelling for the passenger and freight and an efficient service by the operators? And then how to advertise this service in a way that would encourage and simplify this procedure? One of the most important agreements was how the timetable would be represented visually: it was decided to use roman numerals based on the 12-hour format. The conferences increased in number and productivity each year: the founding members were soon joined by Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland and Portugal, and the standardization of time from London ensured that passengers increasingly made the right connections. The meetings were held twice a year, for summer and winter timetables, until the First World War brought cooperation and, in many cases, cross-border travel to an end. (War undid much that was noble about the railways; their potential facilitated modern warfare. The Duke of Wellington would surely have recognized their worth; as of course did Mussolini.)

Excerpted from Timekeepers by Simon Garfield. Copyright © 2017 by Simon Garfield. Excerpted by permission of Canongate Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.